L'esprit de l'escalier
by ZScalantian
Summary: Another long night at Seventh Heaven, and one terrible customer.


3 a.m. That was when Tifa closed the bar, no exceptions. Now, at 4:12, she dragged her tired feet up the wooden staircase, profoundly glad that a long night was over. She stopped by the casement window, looking down into the street, still seething with irritation. As combination bartender/bouncer for Seventh Heaven, she'd been called a lot of things in her time. She'd been called things tonight that she had never been called before.

Tifa fumed. That woman had no right to be so articulate when she was so. damn. smashed. The brawler'd grown up and gone to school in a very isolated town - a hick town, if she was honest. And she'd never gone to college, and never felt any lack for it. Yet, tonight, when she'd been called so many polysyllabic names, she felt a longing for enough education to understand even half of them.

The woman, in her early fifties, glossy-haired and hard-mouthed, with her friends increasingly embarrassed around her, had apparently worked for Shin-Ra in its (and her) "glory days". She blamed AVALANCHE for the loss of her easy life - that Meteorfall was something they'd deliberately set on the planet, just to take down the Company! Her group had come in late, already quite drunk. She'd ordered her first drink very pleasantly, but she'd gotten increasingly noisy and vicious as the evening wore on. Tifa had asked her twice to contain herself, and eventually she'd kicked the woman out. After that point the woman had stood outside the bar and screamed, using words longer than Tifa's arm and obscenities that even Cid might blanch at. Well, okay, that was an exaggeration. Tifa couldn't picture Cid ever being fazed by any cursing, no matter how blue.

Tifa had stamped out and frog-marched the woman to the legal fifty-foot limit of her bouncing authority. At which point, the harridan had gone around back into the alley behind the bar to continue with her tirade. Her friends had been useless. When Tifa asked them to take the woman home, they just shrugged and said "She gets like this now and then." They were basically out to party, and none of them wanted their evening cut short, no matter how inconvenient it was for their hostess.

There wasn't an actual police force in Edge - Midgar had had Shin-Ra security, and the slums had had their gangs to enforce local law. There were WRO officials, but Tifa felt that this was a pretty small thing to trouble them for. One drunk woman. Tifa longed to just shut the woman up herself, but an assault by an AVALANCHE member on a woman accusing them of, well, everything bad ever, might read like an attempt to silence a whistleblower.

If Tifa lived in a better world, she might trust that people would understand that she was just getting rid of an unruly customer. Unfortunately, she didn't, and there was enough lingering nostalgia from Midgar's former upper-crust citizens that there could be a backlash. Instead, she'd called in a favor from a friend at the gym, who'd patrolled the fifty-yard boundary all night and kept the woman from coming any closer.

At 3 o'clock, Tifa had, with intense gratefulness, closed the bar. The woman's friends had departed, and as if to make up for her ghastly behavior, had left excellent tips. Even more to Tifa's liking, they'd collected their drunken compatriot, who'd let loose with a last few choice invectives that Tifa only barely understood, before finally surrendering and leaving.

She was exhausted from another long day, and she had to be up early enough in the morning to get Marlene and Denzel off to school. It had been weeks since she'd last heard anything from Cloud, too. And yet, instead of sleeping, all she really wanted to do right now was hit the gym and take a couple of sandbags to pieces. She stretched instead, twisting her knuckles and cracking her spine. "Zimtzicke," she muttered, felt a little better, and went to bed, satisfied in the knowledge that the woman wouldn't have understood the meaning of the old Nibelheim insult.

Notes:

L'esprit de l'escalier - staircase wit. French term meaning "the witty retort you thought up too late".

Zimtzicke - German for "stupid cow" (or worse translations...). It's a fairly nasty thing to call someone, but Tifa is really quite frustrated here, and no one hears her but herself.


End file.
